The National Academy of Sciences on Native/Foreign Intermarriage

By Bryan Caplan

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How socially distant are two groups? One of sociologists top measures is simply the rate of intermarriage. Since college graduates almost never marry high school dropouts, the two groups are probably extremely socially disconnected. When intermarriage rates rise, similarly, sociologists naturally infer that caste barriers are coming down.

When people bemoan the cultural divide between natives and immigrants, then, looking at intermarriage rates is a good place to start. I reproduce recent National Academy of Sciences data on this point below. But before you look, ask yourself: “What do I expect to see?”

READER COMMENTS

Mike Hammock

Nov 25 2019 at 11:00am

The headings for the last two columns are obscured by the Econlog website formatting (specifically the “explore other Economics and Culture articles” item). Anyone else having this problem? What are those two headings?

robc

Nov 25 2019 at 11:02am

My guess is “Hispanic” and “Sample Size”

robc

Nov 25 2019 at 11:03am

The graph is an image, I just did right click, open in new tab, and I was correct on my heading guesses.

Matthias Görgens

Nov 25 2019 at 11:01am

Would be interesting to see the change after the first anc second generation after immigration.

Mark

Nov 25 2019 at 12:43pm

It’s hard to interpret these numbers in isolation. It’d be good to have comparisons to rates of cross-educational marriage as well as a hypothetical where everyone married randomly (or at least randomly within geography).

There are also big legal barriers to international marriage such that marriage numbers might not reflect actual social conditions. On the one hand, international couples might be more pressured to marry so that both partners can stay in the country, but on the other hand, having to deal with visa problems is a strong deterrent for US citizens to couple up with foreigners.

Mark

Nov 25 2019 at 1:20pm

There is a lot of interesting data in this article actually. The drop in marriage and fertility are interesting. Hispanics, Asian, and white immigrants in the first generation are all about 50% married at ages 20-34. In the second and third generations, the marriage rate falls to about 40% for whites, 30% for Hispanics, and only 20% for Asians. This drop in marriage rates suggests to me that visible minority immigrants, especially Asians and Hispanics to a lesser degree, are having trouble finding partners, which is evidence that they are not being assimilated.

One upshot of this is low fertility among minority immigrants; Asian immigrants are at a 2.1 replacement rate but US Asians are only at 1.69, well below replacement. And fertility rates are measured based on women, given the disparity in marriage rates between Asian men and women, actual Asian fertility based on an average of men and women is probably a good deal lower than that. This low fertility is also an obstacle to assimilation because it means the number of native-born Asian-Americans who might otherwise be a bridge between immigrants and the mainstream is constantly shrinking and the overall Asian-American population is only replenished through immigration. For example, when new Chinese immigration was banned in the 1880s, the Chinese-American population fell by half over the next couple of decades due to extremely low fertility.

Overall, the data suggests that new visible minority of immigrants are not being socially assimilated as well as previous waves of white immigrants were—and we have a long way to go before we can claim to be colorblind in culture as well as in law.

Mark Z

Nov 25 2019 at 3:33pm

East Asians already have a fairly low fertility rate, and I wouldn’t expect any group to fully adopt the reproductive habits of the place they live even after s couple generations. Sexual norms run pretty deep. Asian-Americans also tend to be wealthier, more educated, more urban, and less religious than Americans on average, so can we really be sure they aren’t behaving quite similarly to the American subculture in which they live?

Lastly, many minority cultures themselves promote endogamy. Even many highly Americanized secular Jews strongly encourage their children to marry within their culture, for which I wouldn’t say ‘our culture’ is chiefly to blame.

John Thacker

Nov 25 2019 at 4:16pm

A few stereotypes are true (though, as most people realize, not to the extent that there’s nothing that goes the other direction). Black men are more likely to marry outside their group than black women, and something similar holds for Asian women. Slightly notable is that these effects are more pronounced for immigrants than for native born.

One question that the data does not answer is to what degree to the American labels of race are coherent, particularly among immigrants. National origin is significant, as is certainly some kind of ethnic background; someone of Han Chinese background is disproportionately likely to marry someone else who is, and I can believe that extends to cases even in cases involving first or second generation immigrants from the PRC marrying someone whose grandparents were on Taiwan during Japanese rule. But I’m unsure the degree to which someone of Han Chinese background is more likely to marry someone of Korean or Japanese background compared to any other background (after accounting for base rates in the population), much less a Southeastern Asian background or a South Asian background. “Asian” may be a category that makes sense from an American (white and black) perspective, but not necessarily from the perspective of people who are part of the group. (Listening to the views of some recent immigrants, one might think that among some Chinese or Korean families marrying someone Japanese would be more controversial than marrying someone white.)

John Thacker

Nov 25 2019 at 4:21pm

I would assume in the cases of intra-Asian marriages that involve someone of, e.g. Korean ancestry marrying someone of Bengali ancestry that both partners and any offspring are likely to be well assimilated. Whether that matters for our assumptions about assimilation depends on how rare that is, and thus how it affects the numbers.

mark

Nov 27 2019 at 5:08am

The well-known riddle for economists: US-“Blacks” do much less intermarriage. And esp. US-Black women seem highly inclinded to marry only a black man – no matter that must seem like a less-than-perfect-choice. Good for Michelle Obama she went mixed-race.

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